Jewish Labor Committee Research Articles

Rescue, Relief, and Resistance: The Jewish Labor Committee’s Anti-Nazi Operations, 1934–1945

Rescue, Relief, and Resistance: The Jewish Labor Committee’s Anti-Nazi Operations, 1934–1945

Editor's Introduction

Editor's Introduction

The Jewish Labor Committee's support of Yiddish culture in early post-Holocaust France (1945–1948)

ABSTRACT As soon as the liberation of Europe began, the New York-based Jewish Labor Committee (JLC) started sending material and cultural aid to Jewish and Socialist victims of Nazism. From 1948 onward, the JLC concentrated its primary efforts on reconstruction in Western Europe, particularly in France, where three quarters of the Jewish population had survived the khurbn and where many Jews from Central and Eastern Europe were settling or passing through on their way to further destinations. The dense correspondence resulting from the JLC's transatlantic work serves as the main source for this research. Through these letters sent on a daily basis, we discover both many of the stakes encountered by Holocaust survivors in their reconstruction process and the practical aspects of transnational relief. This article closely examines the contributions of the JLC to support Yiddish culture. It questions the extent to which the JLC, which was closely aligned with labour, Socialist, and Bundist groups, emphasized the political aspect of Yiddish culture. As such, it focuses on the priorities, possibilities and limits of the JLC in supporting a weakened and displaced Yiddish culture in France in the aftermath of the Holocaust and early Cold War period.

Jankiew Pat. „Żydowski brat z ziemi amerykańskiej, który jest też polskim Żydem”

Prezentowany reportaż Jankiewa Pata jest poświęcony działalności Centralnej Żydowskiej Komisji Historycznej, dokumentującej zagładę polskich Żydów – wtedy pod kierownictwem Filipa Friedmana. Autor, przed wojną działacz Centralnej Żydowskiej Organizacji Szkolnej i Bundu, był uzdolnionym literacko dziennikarzem, odbywającym liczne podróże służbowe. W 1938 r. znalazł się w Stanach Zjednoczonych, by zabiegać o pomoc materialną na rzecz szkolnictwa w jidysz w Polsce. Ponieważ nie udało mu się opuścić USA przed wybuchem wojny, związał się z antynazistowskim Żydowskim Komitetem Robotniczym (Jewish Labor Committee). Działał tam także po wojnie. Jako przedstawiciel Komitetu przybył do Polski w 1946 r., by zebrać informacje o stanie żydostwa polskiego oraz udzielić wsparcia finansowego ocalałym i reprezentującym ich instytucjom

The Politics of Unreason: The Frankfurt School and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism

The Politics of Unreason: The Frankfurt School and the Origins of Modern Antisemitism

Notes from the Editors, March 2016

<div class="buynow"><a title="Back issue of Monthly Review, March 2016 (Volume 67, Number 10)" href="http://monthlyreview.org/product/mr-067-10-2016-03/">buy this issue</a></div>Ellen Meiksins Wood, who died on January 14, was coeditor of <em>Monthly Review</em> with Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy from 1997 to 2000, and a major contributor to historical materialist thought in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Her parents were socialist refugees, members of the Jewish Labor Bund who came to the United States in 1941, after fleeing Latvia in the 1930s, when indigenous fascists came to power. Her mother worked for the Jewish Labor Committee in New York and her father for the United Nations. Ellen obtained her B.A. in Slavic languages at the University of California at Berkeley and went on to do graduate studies in political science at Berkeley, where she met and married Neal Wood, a professor in the department. From the late 1960s to the late 1990s, she taught political theory in the political science department at York University in Toronto.<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-10" title="Vol. 67, No. 10: March 2016" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>

“Relief is a political gesture:” The Jewish Labor Committee’s interventions in war-torn Poland, 1939-1945

This paper describes the role of an American organization, the Jewish Labor Committee (JLC), in the support of Jewish people in Poland during World War II. In the context of the division and occupation of Poland by the USSR and by Nazi Germany, the JLC’s help materialized in two ways: relief (generally in kind) was sent to Jewish refugees in Russia; money was sent for relief and for weapons to Jews in the General Government region under German rule. In the latter situation, the JLC contributed to support the preparations for the insurrection of the Warsaw ghetto. The channels of information and transmission by which the JLC acted are described in both cases. The common Bundist political culture shared by both the leaders of the JLC in New York (former political refugees themselves) and the most influential political organizations in the ghetto explains the JLC’s ability to come into contact with leaders of the ghetto and to react immediately to the news of the systematic destruction of the Jewish population. In this extreme case, the nature of the JLC’s interventions, a bridge between two worlds, is defined as being political as well as humanitarian.

Anti-Semitism and Critical Social Theory: The Frankfurt School in American Exile

Ziege’s book focuses primarily on the two main empirical studies carried out by Max Horkheimer’s Institute of Social Research during its exile in the United States in the 1940s: a relatively unknown and never-published study of anti-Semitism among American workers and the much better known, five-volume Studies in Prejudice. Ziege poses and successfully answers the question of why the Institute began to focus more on empirical studies and anti-Semitism in the 1940s. Her thorough archival research illuminates as never before the Institute’s relations to the main organizations that funded its ambitious empirical projects during this time: the American Jewish Committee and the Jewish Labor Committee. She also provides the richest existing account of how the experience of American exile affected the Institute’s theoretical premises and empirical work. By distinguishing between the Institute’s ‘esoteric’ theoretical assumptions, which maintained a large degree of continuity with its earlier work, and a willingness to work at the ‘exoteric’ level with many scholars who didn’t share these assumptions, Ziege explains how the Institute made certain concessions to mainstream American academic culture without ever abandoning the radical intentions of Critical Theory.

Mutualité, fraternité et travail social chez les bundistes de France (1944-1947)

As soon as the capital was liberated, French bundists began anew their social service activities for the Jewish population close to their movement. The ser-vices of the mutual aid society Arbeter Ring (Workman’s Circle) were thus at the core of the social services that they offered. Helped financially by the Jewish Labor Committee, the Bund and the Arbeter Ring developed a system of aide intended to be mutual and fraternal, as opposed to the philanthropic methods of Jewish professional institutions in the domain of social work. Nonetheless, faced with the neediness of the Jewish population in France, this kind of fraternal aid proved insufficient. This article questions the strength and the importance of this kind of fraternal help in the context of the development of social work in the heart of the Jewish community in the immediate postwar years.

‘Anti-Semitism among American Labor’: a study by the refugee scholars of the Frankfurt School of Sociology at the end of World War II

This article analyzes the unpublished 1400-page report ‘Anti-Semitism among American Labor’, produced in 1944–1945 by the German scholars of the Frankfurt School of Sociology during their exile in the United States. Overlooked so far by labor historians and by historians of Jewish and World War II history, this report is analyzed here with specific attention to its contents as well as to the historical circumstances of its production during World War II. The article explains the larger strategy of the Jewish Labor Committee which commissioned it. It also situates this study in the production of the German sociologists who realized it. Finally, the article argues that, in the context of the war production effort, the alleged anti-Semitism of the American working class was a fluctuant and paradigmatic sign of tension and frustration which eventually gave way to other forms of literal or imaginary conflicts.

La Scuola di Francoforte in esilio: storia di un'inchiesta sull'antisemitismo nella classe operaia americana

- Between July and December 1944 the Institute for social research of Columbia University made known the results of a survey on anti-Semitism in the American working class carried out by the Jewish Labor Committee of New York. The results of the research confirmed the rooting of a few stereotypes and prejudices on Jews in some specific segments of the American working world: more widespread among "blue collars" rather than "white collars" and among the white population rather than the black. This form of anti-Semitism involved, paradoxically, also the workers of factories producing weapons to fight against the Third Reich. A form of anti-Semitism which did not stop with the end of World War II but turned, using the same mechanisms analyzed by migrant German sociologists, into a discrimination against communist militants.Parole chiave: Scuola di Francoforte, esilio, classe operaia, antisemitismo, razzismo, comunismo School of Frankfurt, exile, anti-Semitism, working class, racism, communism

We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust (review)

Reviewed by: We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust David Cesarani (bio) We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust. By Hasia R. Diner. New York: New York University Press, 2009. xiii + 494 pp. For several years the debate over postwar responses to the Jewish catastrophe has simply recycled the same data, with partisans declaring that the cup is either half empty or half full depending on their point of view. Now, thanks to the mountain of evidence she has excavated, Hasia Diner has landed a knockout punch on those who assert that after 1945 American Jews were silent about the fate that befell the Jewish communities in Nazi-occupied Europe, preferring to forget about it while busily integrating into American society and enjoying the postwar boom. This is not to say that Diner has answered all the questions hanging over the manner in which American Jews during the 1950s treated recent Jewish history. But within the terms of her inquiry it is hard to see how it would be possible to do a fuller or a better job. Her book will change the landscape of postwar American Jewish history irrevocably; the textbooks will have to be rewritten. [End Page 338] Diner’s methodology is simplicity itself: she has gone back to the sources. She has waded through countless sermons and liturgies written to commemorate the murdered Jews of Europe. She has looked at the record of meetings organized by an array of Jewish organizations to see how their leaders and members reflected on the war years. She has examined every major national periodical, and many minor local ones, serving American Jews. She has gone from the assiduous collators of the Jewish Book Annual to the history books, novels, books for children, textbooks, prayer books and anything else that touched on the recent genocide. She has also listened to recordings of radio broadcasts and tracked down TV programs that handled the subject. The weight of evidence is crushing. If her narrative has one stylistic weakness it is due to the unavoidable necessity of repeating the same thing over and over again. Even before the war had ended American Jews began commemorating their brethren slaughtered in Europe. Each section of the community did so according to its own particular traditions. The non-Orthodox were most able to draft new prayers or adapt old ones; secular Jews, especially in the Jewish labor movement, quickly established dates and patterns for memorial meetings. Religious and nonreligious sentiments converged on Passover as a key time in the Jewish calendar for remembrance because it overlapped with the anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. During the 1950s, Rabbi Rufus Learsi’s memorial haggadah was distributed to over 10,000 communal organizations and printed annually in over thirty Jewish periodicals. Dozens of Torah scrolls from destroyed communities in Europe were brought to the United States and distributed to congregations that made their reception and display a focal point for memorial activity. Contrary to the notion that little was written or published about the genocide, Jewish institutions launched research projects, collected material, and built up libraries. YIVO led the way, but the Institute for Jewish Affairs and the American Jewish Committee all contributed to a wave of publications. The Joint Distribution Committee and the Jewish Labor Committee channelled funds to survivor historians in Europe whose research fed back into public awareness in America. Within just a few years reviewers in Jewish Social Studies, notably Philip Friedman and Koppel Pinson, were bemoaning the sheer volume of historical works on the Nazi period. There was certainly no inhibition against exploring the subject. American Jews raised prodigious amounts of money for the survivors and sent aid of all kinds, including rabbis and social workers (such as Pinson). In campaigning for the improvement of conditions in displaced persons camps and struggling to enlarge the quotas for immigration to [End Page 339] the U.S., they constantly invoked recent horrors. Their incessant campaign against British restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine and for the Zionist cause unhesitatingly drew on sympathy for Jews as the survivors of Nazi...

Jews in American politics: Past and present

T response of leaders of the American Jewish Comittee to the crisis of German Jewry in the 1930s found sick and old men, lacking influence in the American political arena, insecure about being Jews and often more busy with business and family than with the plight of German Jewry. In sharp contrast to this period, a very different picture emerges of Jewish leaders and organizations in the 1970s and 1980s. At least four major differences are worth noting. First, a single organization, the American Jewish Committee, had an initial advantage on access and ties to the Roosevelt administration in Washington. It was the major Jewish organization in American politics. There were other establishment organizations on the scene with considerably less influence, including the American Jewish Congress, B'nai B'rith (with its AntiDefamation League), and the Jewish Labor Committee. In the 1970s, there were many Jewish organizations, establishment and grassroots, operating actively on local, regional, and national levels in the struggle for Soviet Jewry. Many had influence and access in Washington, D.C. There was active competition between the grassroots and the establishment and within the establishment. For example, the National Conference for Soviet Jewry (NCSJ) competed (and cooperated) on national and local levels with the Council for Jewish Federations (CJF), National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Councils (NJCRAC), the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and the Coalition for Soviet Jewry as well as with the Union of Councils, representing the grassroots. All of these organizations had varying degrees of access and influence with Congress and the administration. A second significant difference is the quality of leadership. The top echelon of the American Jewish Committee of the 1930s consisted of very wealthy and professionally successful men. Many, however, were older, often sick and over extended; other commitments both professional and personal limited their time and involvement in concerns and activities of the Committee. For example, the Committee failed to find members to represent it "at home and abroad in meetings and conferences on the German Jewish crisis. The wealth and position of its members sometimes enabled contact with Europe and European Jewry, but when business did not permit a trip or vacation, the Committee was not represented." Family concerns also interfered. "In May 1939, realizing that the situation of Jews in Germany was desperate, the Committee wished to schedule additional meetings on Sunday. The plan failed, however, because in the spring so many of the members went to the country for weekends." Most of the organizations in the 1970s and 1980s had an overabundance of qualified and dynamic lay leadership, both men and women, with countless replacements waiting in the wings. Persons active in Jewish organizational life, often persons of means, dominated the lay leadership of the Soviet Jewry advocacy movement in the 1970s. Unlike their counterparts in the 1930s, however, most took leave from their other organizational, professional, and business pursuits and committed themselves full time to the Soviet Jewry advocacy movement. Importantly, tbr many, their personal, peer, and communal status was earned via activism in a particular Jewish organization. Many of these organizations in the 1970s and 1980s had extensive and expanding professional staffs especially in existing and long established organizations like CJF, NJCRAC, American Jewish Committee, American Joint Distribution Committee (JDC), and Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS). In sharp contrast, the ad hoc and newer organizations were hampered by staff shortages reflecting a lack of fiscal stability. The NCSJ, for example, suffered from a shortage of staff throughout which harmed its activities and effectiveness. Third, and most importantly, establishment Jewish leaders during the 1930s were insecure as American Jews. They often refrained from pressing Jewish issues and Jewish causes. They sought Christian allies to fight antiSemitism "without American Jews appearing in...[the struggle])." The American Jewish Committee, for example, adopted "quict diplomacy," "believing it to be

The Jewish Labor Committee, American Labor, and the Rescue of European Socialists, 1934–1941

The Jewish Labor Committee (JLC), founded in New York in 1934, was the vanguard of American labor's anti-Nazi and antifascist activism. The JLC grew out of the Jewish labor movement in the US. In 1940–1941, it achieved the rescue of hundreds of European labor and social-democratic party leaders trapped in France by the invading German army or in Lithuania by the Soviet army. Among these persons were some of the foremost leaders of the Labour and Socialist International and of the International Federation of Trade Unions. Many others were Polish Bundists, the JLC's founders' original political family, doubly exposed to Nazi brutality by their Jewish identity and social-democratic positions. This event is the focal point from which American labor's international solidarity for the labor victims of Nazism and fascism can be observed. In addition, the connection between the JLC and the Emergency Rescue Committee whose agent, Varian Fry, rescued artists and intellectuals, is also established in the paper.

Paul Vignaux; inspirateur de la « Deuxième gauche » : récits d'un exil français aux Etats-Unis pendant la Seconde guerre mondiale

Laurent Jeanpierre, Paul Vignaux, an Inspirator of the "Second Left": Perspectives on a French Refugee in the United States during World War II. Paul Vignaux's exile in the United-States during WWII is a decisive event in the genesis of the French New Left. With the assistance of American unions, the Jewish Labor Committee and German left dissident groups, Vignaux developed a network of information and funds between the United-States and French socialist resistance movements. He became a propagandist and an OSS agent. He deeply renewed his thought on labor unionism by studying the American paradigm of social relations. His trajectory shows that a constellation appears as soon as 1942 between social Catholicism, anticommunism and pro-americanism, which has transformed the French political field since then.

La solidarité ethnique et politique dans l'exil : Le Jewish Labor Committee et les réfugiés anti-nazis et anti-fascistes, 1934-1941

Catherine Collomp, Ethnic and Political Solidarity: The Jewish Labor Committee and Antinazi and Antifascist Refugees, 1934-41. This article presents the role of the Jewish Labor Committee, founded in 1934, in the struggle against nazism and fascism from the United States. Springing from the American "Jewish labor movement" in the garment trades, this organization, whose leaders had been Bundists in the Russian empire, obtained the support of the American Federation of Labor to establish American unions' solidarity for the victims of nazi and fascist persecution perpetrated against Jews but also against German, Austrian, Italian, Polish and Tcheck labor leaders, socialists and social-democrats more generally. In 1940-1941, the JLC organized two rescue operations for these leaders and militants who had sought refuge in Southern France or in Lithuania.

Why Were the Jews Sacrificed?: The Place of Anti-Semitism in Dialectic of Enlightenment

The penultimate section of Dialectic of Enlightenment, of Anti-Semitism was composed in the summer of 1943, four years after work on the book had begun, and after all the other sections were completed. As was the case with the first chapter, the Elements were a collaborative enterprise. Leo Liwenthal contributed to the first three theses, and it is likely that the remaining three, and certainly the fifth and most original thesis on idiosyncrasy and mimesis, were jointly dictated by Horkheimer and Adorno in July 1943.1 The seventh thesis, added in 1947, was solely the work of Horkheimer. Not initially intended for the volume published in 1944, the Elements are usually described as theoretical elaborations destined for the Institute for Social Research's anti-Semitism project begun in 1939 and announced in the 1941 issue of the Institute's journal.2 In mid-1943 the anti-Semitism project took on renewed importance when the institute was entrusted by the Jewish Labor Committee to conduct a massive study of American labor's attitudes towards Jews. The following year, the American Jewish Committee selected Horkheimer as its Director of Scientific Research and launched an ambitious program culminating in the five part Studies in Prejudice series published in 1949 and

Letters to the Editor

Letters to the Editor William D. Rubinstein Dear Editor, The scattered references provided by Professor Wyman do not show what he thinks they do. Of course the bombing of Auschwitz was publicly discussed in Jewish newspapers and news bulletins in the summer of 1944. But it is striking how little impact they made at the time. In 1942 and 1943 there were numerous large-scale demonstrations by American Jewish groups, attended by thousands, demanding the rescue of European Jewry. (None of their proposals included bombing Auschwitz, of course). When the suggestion to bomb Auschwitz first surfaced in May–June 1944, no demonstrations of any kind were held in favour of the bombings, and I must reiterate my point that the reception to the bombing proposals, among Diaspora Jewish groups, was generally either surprisingly lukewarm or overtly hostile. Most emphatically, it must be stressed that such proposals were not viewed at the time as a panacea and remained almost entirely unknown (see below) for several decades. There were two main reasons for this surprisingly ambiguous attitude. First, there was real and genuine concern that any bombing raids would simply kill more Jews (a concern which was probably quite well-taken). Secondly the bombing proposals coincided with D-Day and the opening of the Second Front, upon which the fate of Europe depended, and whose success alone would rid the world of the Nazi scourge. It is not surprising that most American Jewish leaders pinned their hopes on the Allied invasion and did not forcefully pursue the proposals to bomb Auschwitz, even if they viewed these as a panacea (which they didn’t). An example of American attitudes at this time may be found in the following extract from a Report of a meeting between John W. Pehle, head of the War Refugee Board, and five prominent Jewish leaders on 16 August 1944. There is no reason to believe that either Pehle or the Jewish leaders were misrepresenting the prevalent view of the bombing question at this time. “REPORT OF MEETING WITH JOHN W. PEHLE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR AND MESSRS. LESSER AND FRIEMAN OF THE WAR REFUGEE BOARD August 16, 1944 STRICTLY CONFIDENTIAL The committee consisted of Mr. Eugene Hevesi, of the American Jewish Committee, Rabbi Abraham Kalmanowitz, of the Vaad Ha-Hazalah, [End Page 113] Dr. A. Leon Kubowitzki, of the World Jewish Congress, Mr. R. Sherman of the Jewish Labor Committee, and I.L. Kenen, secretary, Rescue Commission, American Jewish Conference. Mr. Kenen introduced the delegation as a committee representing all Jewish organizations, including those affiliated with the Conference and a number outside the Conference, such as the American Jewish Committee and the Vaad Ha-Hazalah. In addition, he continued, the World Jewish Congress was represented by Dr. Kubowitzki. The organizations had united to expedite rescue measures in view of the situation in Hungary. He said that it was the intention in the future to have representations to the Board made, if possible, by a committee representing all the organizations and thus eliminate duplication of activity. Mr. Pehle said that when he had first taken office, he had hoped that such a unified representation might be achieved but found it impossible at that time. . . . Dr. Kubowitzki raised the question of the destruction of Nazi extermination facilities. Mr. Pehle doubted that this could be done. He said that a proposal to bomb the facilities had been objected to by Jewish organizations because it would result in the extermination of large numbers of Jews there, and the alternative, he said, was to send an underground detachment. He asked whether we had taken this up with the Polish Government in Exile and he expressed doubt that the Poles could muster the strength for such engagements. (Original at YIVO, AJC Archives, Waldman Series, Box 18, Folder 1.)” Prof. Wyman’s handful of post-war, pre-1970s references to the bombing of Auschwitz must also be queried. First, however, since writing The Myth of Rescue I have become aware that these proposals were indeed mentioned at the time of the Eichmann Trial (1960–62), especially in the London Jewish Chronicle. One might, however, place this fact in a much wider context: since Prof. Wyman’s list...

The Jewish Labor Committee: A Resource for Researchers

(1997). The Jewish Labor Committee: A Resource for Researchers. The Journal of Holocaust Education: Vol. 6, No. 2, pp. 110-113.

The Medem-Bibliotek : The Yiddish Library of Paris

138 SHOFAR Spring 1996 Vol. 14, No.3 THE MEDEM-BIBLIOTEK: THE YIDDISH LIBRARY OF PARIS by Gilles Rozier Gilles Rozier, director of the Medem Ubrary, is completing a doctoral dissertation at the University of Paris VII on the writers of the review Yung-yidisb in Lodz. Rozier's publications include a volume of French translations (in collaboration with Viviane Siman) of the American Yiddish poet Celia Dropkin, Dans Ie vent cbaud (paris: L'Harmattan, 1994). The story of the Medem Ubrary is deeply intertwined with the history of Jewish immigration to Paris from Eastern Europe, especially regarding the activities of the Jewish Labor Bund1 in France. Mass immigration, which began in 1880, saw its first great period of development before World War I, with the birth of Yiddish political parties and trade unions. The first Bundist organization in Paris, the Pamer yidisber arbeter-bildungs-fareyn (Parisian Jewish Workers' Union for Education), was established in 1900. The year 1904 saw the creation of a mutual-aid society, the Arbeter-fareyn Kemler (the "Fighters '" Workers' Union), which sponsored a library and a small theatrical troupe. The library was situated at 27, rue des Ecouffes, in the third arrondissement of Paris, in the heart of the Marais, a neighborhood we shall speak more of later. During the first world war, the Bundist groups offered assistance to families in need and sponsored a low-cost dining hall. IThe Bund was a Jewish socialist party, founded in Vilna in 1897. It supported national rights for the Jews, promoted the use of Yiddish in all spheres of life, and was secularistic and anti-Zionist. [All notes to this article are by the translator.) The Yiddish Library ofParis 139 In 1922, leftist immigrants of various stripes-communists, Bundists, and Po'alei Zion (labor Zionists)-created the Kultur-lige (Culture League), whose activities included the establishment of a library. In 1925, the communists took control of the Kultur-lige and its library, whereupon the Bundists and Po'alei Zion founded their own organizations. The Bundists called theirs the Arbeter-klub afn nomen Vladimir Medem (the Vladimir Medem Workers' Club), also known as the Medem-jarband (Medem Union), named for the Bundist ideologue, who was born in latvia in 1879, and died in New York in 1923. The club had sixty members at its inception. In 1928, seven young immigrants from Eastern Europe, all members of the Medem-jarband, created a new library, called the Nombergbibliotek baym Medem-jarband (Nomberg library of the Medem Union ), after the Yiddish journalist and writer Hersh David Nomberg, who had died a· year earlier. A photograph, taken on February 16, 1929, shows the seven founders: Yitzhok Blumenstein, Metr Mendelsohn (the only formally trained intellectual of the group), Hatm Golub, Leyb Tabatchnik, Avrom Zusman, Eli Shvirinski, Dovid Leiber and Kiwe Vaisbrot . That photograph still reigns supreme above the bust of Vladimir Medem in the library office. The library was first installed at 50, rue des Francs-Bourgeois, once again in the heart of the Marais. At the time, it occupied the floor above a cafe. The Marais, which Jews called the pletsl (the little plaza), is now one of the trendiest neighborhoods in Paris. At the time, it was one of the areas most densely populated with Jewish immigrants.. To raise funds to inaugurate the library, the Medem-klub organized in 1928 a cultural evening, in which the writers David Einhorn, Sholem Asch, Zalman Shneour and Peretz Hirschbein took part. The monies collected allowed the Medem-klub to acquire the first volumes for the library as well as to purchase cabinets for books at the nearby BHV department store. Sholem Asch donated two hundred books, and three hundred were given by Baruch Charney Vladeck, general manager of New York's Yiddish daily Foroerts and future chairman of the Jewish labor Committee. In 1932, the Bundist movement established the Parisian ArbeterRing (Workmen's Circle), as a mutual-aid society and also as the agency responsible for the college of the movement and its tsugob-shul (complementary school). Shortly thereafter, it moved into 110, rue Vieille-duTemple , also in the Marais. For thirty years these offices, occupying a large apartment on the third floor of...